We believe that the UK’s response to the refugee crisis is seriously inadequate.

The costs in human wellbeing of the refugee crisis, however calculated, are so extremely high that it is morally unacceptable for the UK not to play a fuller part in taking in refugees.

The UK’s current offer of 20,000 resettlement places spread over five years, only open to those still outside the EU, and only open to Syrians, is too low, too slow and too narrow.

As the world’s fifth largest economy, the UK can do far more. The UK in its recent history has taken in far higher numbers of asylum seekers and refugees and at far greater speed and managed it well (some 85,000 people claimed asylum in the UK in 2002 alone, for example).

Refugees should be taken in because they are morally and legally entitled to international protection, not because of the economic advantages they may bring. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the economic contribution of refugees and their descendants to the UK has been high (for example the Ugandan Asian refugees, whose arrival in Britain in 1972 was greeted with initial anxiety, went on to make an ‘extraordinary contribution’ to British life, as the Prime Minister has observed).

The Government’s current policy is based on the misguided premise that refugees will be deterred from travelling to the EU by refusing to take in those who have arrived and by refusing to offer safe or legal routes by which to come. That misunderstands the intolerable ‘push’ factors that are forcing people out of countries of persecution and from neighbouring countries in which a humanitarian disaster is escalating in the camps. It is the parallel of the Government’s earlier policy of trying to ‘deter’ travel by scaling down search and rescue in the Mediterranean- a failed policy which cost lives. Instead, the failure to offer safe, legal routes into the EU is forcing refugees to rely on the services of people smugglers and to risk death and injury; and the failure to take in refugees from other EU member states is contributing to a further humanitarian disaster in the peripheral EU countries this winter.

Nor does the current lack of safe, legal routes into the EU for refugees protect security - rather it outsources immigration control to people smugglers and generates chaos, suffering and death at the EU's periphery.

We therefore call on the UK government to urgently adopt a refugee policy which abides by the following four principles:

The UK should take a fair and proportionate share of refugees, both those already within the EU and those still outside it.

Safe and legal routes to the UK, as well as to the EU, need to be established.

Safe and legal routes within the EU, including the UK, should be established.

There should be access to fair and thorough procedures to determine eligibility for international protection wherever it is sought.

The signatories of this letter have all signed in a personal capacity.

126 Signatories

Former senior officials in government and international organisations

Baron Mark Malloch Brown, KCMG, PC. Former Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations and former Government Minister.

Peter Sutherland, United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration. Former Director-General of GATT, subsequently the World Trade Organisation; former EC Commissioner responsible for Competition Policy; former Chairman of Goldman Sachs and BP; former Chairman of the London School of Economics.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director Oxford Martin School and Professor of Globalisation and Development. Former Vice-President of the World Bank.

Professor Sir Richard Jolly, Honorary Professor and Senior Research Associate at Institute of Development Studies. Former Assistant Secretary General, United Nations and former Deputy Executive Director at UNICEF.

Jonathan Portes, Principal Research Fellow at National Institute for Economic and Social Research. Former Chief Economist to the Cabinet Office.

Professor Guy Standing, Professor in Development Studies. Former Director of Socio-economic Security and Former Director of Labour Market Policies, International Labour Organisation.

Sarah Cliffe, Director of the Center on International Coordination at New York University. Former Assistant Secretary-General of Civilian Capacities to the United Nations; and former Special Representative and Director for the World Bank 2011 Development Report.

Emeritus Professors of economics and related fields

Emeritus Professor William Brown CBE, Professor of Industrial Relations, Cambridge University. Former Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. Former member of the Low Pay Commission and of the Council of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Professor Geoffrey Harcourt, Emeritus Professor in the History of Economic Theory, University of Cambridge